a silouette of diana mudgee

Diana Mudgee: woman, mother, land owner, survivor

About this site

This website has been designed by the AIATSIS Family History Unit to celebrate the life of Diana Mudgee.

Since 1997, we have received family history information requests from over twenty of Diana’s descendants and we realised that it would be necessary to develop a co-ordinated response to them. As a result we began to streamline the process by which we were providing Diana’s descendants with information and putting them in touch with one another.

Marcia Rutter, one of Diana’s descendants, had researched the family extensively, gathering a wealth of information which she kindly deposited at the AIATSIS Library. This information was the basis of our response to requests relating to Diana and her family and we began to consider more efficient ways of making it available to her descendants. With this in mind, we decided to develop a webpage about Diana to help inform her descendants and others interested in learning about her.

Work on this project has involved creating a database of Diana’s descendants and requesting permission from Marcia Rutter and others to reproduce documents on the website. A significant amount of time has been spent researching Diana in order to fill in blanks and to confirm details. Our aim was to develop a website that contained as much information as possible on Diana, her family and others that influenced her life. We feel it is our responsibility to provide Diana’s descendants with the most complete resource possible.

In conducting this research, our respect for Diana as an Aboriginal woman, mother, land owner and survivor became immense. We were reminded what a remarkable person Diana was. We have become passionate about telling Diana’s story and hope that this website does her justice.

Sensitivity

The resources in this website contain words or descriptions which reflect the author’s attitude or that of the period in which the item was written. These may be considered inappropriate today in some circumstances. The resources may also contain images and other references to deceased people which may cause sadness or distress, particularly to the relatives of these people.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the kind assistance of the following: Marcia Rutter, Debbie Oxley, Cara Shipp, Louise Haigh, Dubbo and District Historical Society and the many descendants of Diana.

AIATSIS would also like to greatfully acknowledge the following record holding institutions for their assistance and kind permission to reproduce items from their collections in this exhibition: